lafayette+high+school

SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building

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Mies van der Rohe was the son of a stonemason and his early constructional training came from his father. As a young man he gained experience of the modern school from study of the architecture of the earlier leaders, notably Peter Behrens, Hendrik Berlage and Frank Lloyd Wright. He commenced architectural practice in 1913 and soon after the First World War was establishing his own version of modern architecture. His building materials were always of the highest quality, of marble, stone, glass and, especially, steel. He stripped his designs of all extraneous decoration: more than any of his contemporaries he followed the theme of elegance, functionalism and an ascetic concentration on essentials. He believed that architectural design should not look backwards but should reflect the contemporary achievement of advanced technology in both its construction and the materials used, and he began early in his career to act upon these beliefs. Typical was his early concrete and glass office building of 1922, after which, more importantly, came his designs for the German Pavilion at the Barcelona Exposition of 1929. These designs included his famous Barcelona chair, made from chrome steel and leather in a geometrical design, one which has survived as a classic and is still in production. Another milestone was his Tugendhat House in Brno (1930), a long, low, rectilinear structure in glass and steel that set a pattern for many later buildings of this type. In 1930 Mies followed his colleagues as third Director of the Bauhaus, but due to the rise of National Socialism in Germany it was closed in 1933. He finally left Germany for the USA in 1937, and the following year he took up his post as Director of Architecture in Chicago at what is now known as the Illinois Institute of Technology and where he remained for twenty years. In America Mies van der Rohe continued to develop his work upon his original thesis. His buildings are always recognizable for their elegance, fine proportions, high-quality materials and clean, geometrical forms; nearly all are of glass and steel in rectangular shapes. The structure and design evolved according to the individual needs of each commission, and there were three fundamental types of design. One type was the single or grouped high-rise tower, built for apartments for the wealthy, as in his Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago (1948–51), or for city-centre offices, as in his Seagram Building in New York (1954–8, with Philip Johnson) or his Chicago Federal Centre (1964). Another form was the long, low rectangle based upon the earlier Tugendhat House and seen again in the New National Gallery in Berlin (1965–8). Third, there were the grouped schemes when the commission called for buildings of varied purpose on a single, large site. Here Mies van der Rohe achieved a variety and interest in the different shapes and heights of buildings set out in spatial harmony of landscape. Some examples of this type of scheme were housing estates (Lafayette Park Housing Development in Detroit, 1955–6), while others were for educational, commercial or shopping requirements, as at the Toronto Dominion Centre (1963–9).

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SUBJECT AREA: Broadcasting, Electronics and information technology, Telecommunications

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After initial education at Trinity College School, Port Hope, Ontario, Fessenden studied at Bishops University, Lennoxville, Quebec. When he graduated in 1885, he became Principal of the Whitney Institute in Bermuda, but he left the following year to go to New York in pursuit of his scientific interests. There he met Edison and eventually became Chief Chemist at the latter's Laboratory in Orange, New Jersey. In 1890 he moved to the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, and two years later he returned to an academic career as Professor of Electrical Engineering, initially at Purdue University, Lafayette, Indiana, and then at the Western University of Pennsylvania, where he worked on wireless communication. From 1900 to 1902 he carried out experiments in wireless telegraphy at the US Weather Bureau, filing several patents relating to wire and liquid thermal detectors, or barretters. Following this he set up the National Electric Signalling Company; under his direction, Alexanderson and other engineers at the General Electric Company developed a high-frequency alternator that enabled him to build the first radiotelephony transmitter at Brant Rock, Massachusetts. This made its initial broadcast of speech and music on 24 December 1906, received by ship's wireless operators several hundred miles away. Soon after this the transmitter was successfully used for two-way wireless telegraphy communication with Scotland. Following this landmark event, Fessenden produced numerous inventions, including a radio compass, an acoustic depth-finder and several submarine signalling devices, a turboelectric drive for battleships and, notably, in 1912 the heterodyne principle used in radio receivers to convert signals to a lower (intermediate) frequency.

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